Toby on Tuesday

'Going Postal'

This is my final post before the New Year, so where better to close 2015 than with a cool look at this month’s Oldham West and Royton by-election?   Our candidate there was the highly credible John Bickley, but to understand a Labour heartland constituency like this the best place to begin is the Oldham Council website.   Under ‘Postal Voting’ this reads, “You can have a postal vote instead of going to your polling station.   We can send it to any address, even abroad.   The ballot paper must be returned by the day of the election.”   

When Tony Blair introduced postal voting on demand in 2001 he knew just what he was doing, as did the public sector unions and Labour Party client communities at whom the change was directed.   So did Jim McMahon, former leader of Oldham Metropolitan District Council and Labour by-election candidate, and it would be fascinating to know just how many postal votes were in fact sent abroad and to which countries.   So it is in this context that we need to read the by-election numbers.  

The following table really says it all:

Of the 27,706 votes cast at the by-election, a low 40.3% turnout, 7,115 (25.7%) were postal votes.   Given its mastery of the system, it is a safe bet that the vast majority of these were for the Labour Party.   And so the by-election marked solid progress for UKIP but not the hoped-for breakthrough in Labour’s heartland.   Both the Conservative and LibDem vote collapsed and it continues to surprise me that neither party is pressing to repeal the 2001 postal voting legislation which the Labour Party continues to exploit in a way that is certainly irregular if not illegal.

And what of UKIP?   Over the next four years we must persevere in the knowledge that a Corbyn-led Labour Party will entrench itself still more in constituencies like Oldham.   And we must offer an upbeat message about what Britain can become at a time when the politics of identity are all-important.   The narrative over the dysfunctional EU is nearly won now and so we need to build a new narrative of a post-Brexit Britain.   This will be of an outward-looking nation of brave, creative, enterprising men and women, well able to cope with all the challenges of the new world.  

If we find that we have to stand alone, so be it, as we have always been at our best when we have stood alone.   This is the positive message that can forge a renewed identity for UKIP, enabling us to win elections across the country however much our opponents twist and bend the rules to their advantage.   There’ll be more on this in the New Year.   In the meantime, a happy and peaceful Christmas to all the readers of this blog, website and facebook, who now number well over 3.000 every week!

Until 2016!

Toby

Toby on Tuesday

'Reverence and Reclamation'

There have been three events in the past week that will help shape all our futures.   The first was the vote on bombing IS in Syria in which our one MP, Douglas Carswell, quite properly supported the Government.   The real challenge of course will be to deal with the cancer of jihadism in our own country, with the ability to control our borders again and the end of using human rights legislation to protect terrorists.   The second was yet another honourable second place for UKIP in the Oldham West by-election.   But the third, and in some ways the most significant, was the news that India had overtaken China to become the fastest growing economy in the world.   Thanks in large part to her one-child policy, China’s growth is slowing while India’s growth is now running at comfortably above the astonishing rate of 7% a year.

This was underscored recently by the one piece of good news to come from our beleaguered steel industry for many months.   This was the purchase by India-based Sanjeev Gupta’s Liberty House Group of Caparo Tubular Solutions, based in Oldbury in the West Midlands, which had fallen into administration.   As the steel industry across the EU finds itself at the mercy of growing energy costs and dumping by Chinese producers, Mr. Gupta is taking a counter-cyclical view and will be combining the company with his existing facility in Wales, “in order to create a comprehensive and robust model for the steel sector in the UK.”  So the time has come to rekindle the centuries-old love affair between Britain and India.   By this I don’t mean any unwanted Government “soft power” initiative to influence Indian politics, but rather to recapture the spirit of an earlier India where adventurous young Britons went to trade, to make something of themselves and often to find personal fulfilment.   

The East India Company’s first Governor-General, Warren Hastings, was so dazzled by the world he found there that in 1785 he authorised the first translation into English of the Hindu holy “Bhagavad Gita”, the “Song of the Lord”.   In his introduction to this, he wrote with great prescience, “Every instance which brings the Indians’ real character home to observation will...teach us to estimate them by the measure of our own.   But such instances can only be obtained by their writings, and these will survive, when the British dominion of India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance.”   And he sent his friend George Bogle to explore Bhutan and Tibet.   There Bogle had two daughters by a Tibetan wife and wrote in admiration of Tibet’s unique form of polygamy in which one woman could take multiple husbands!

So as both the Continent of Europe and the Middle East are drawn deeper into the abyss, it is time to rekindle the reverence for India that inspired those young adventurers of 250 years ago.   And it is time too to reclaim our immigration policy, so that criminals and terrorists from within the EU no longer have an absolute right of entry into our country, while doctors, scientists and indeed investors from India, now the world’s fastest growing economy, can be made welcome here for their benefit and for the great benefit of our people!

Until next Tuesday!

Toby

Toby on Tuesday

'Trade and Treachery'

Before James Bond, there was Richard Hannay.   He was the character created by John Buchan in five superb adventures set around the time of the First World War.   The most famous was “The Thirty-Nine Steps”, but the one with greatest resonance today was “Greenmantle”, written in 1916 as war raged across Europe.   In the story Richard Hannay, a uniquely resourceful British intelligence officer, faces an uprising against the West by Wahhabi Islamic fanatics, orchestrated by Germany and her Turkish ally.   And Buchan’s plot was based on fact, for in November 1915 Turkey had indeed called for a military jihad against Great Britain, France and Russia, so this was no figment of Buchan’s imagination.   And although Ian Fleming’s James Bond is a less straightforward and more obsessive character, there is no doubt that his inspiration came directly from Buchan’s Richard Hannay.

Now, during the First World War, Britain’s principal ally in the Middle East was the Hashemite dynasty, led by the moderate and experienced Sharif Hussein bin Ali.   His bitter rival for dominance of the Arab world was the house of Saud, led by the Bedouin Ibn Saud, a follower of Muhammad ibn al Wahhab, creator of Wahhabism with its aim of creating a new caliphate based on Mecca and Medina.   And what has continuing resonance is that it was a British traitor, Harry St. John (Jack) Philby, who as an intelligence officer in the Middle East and in defiance of his own Government’s policy relayed vital information to Ibn Saud, who was thereby able to defeat Sharif Hussein and create a Wahhabi supporting dynasty based indeed on Mecca and Medina.   And like father like son, for Jack Philby was father to the poisonous, narcissistic Kim Philby, another successful traitor in a later generation.

In a sense we are all now living with the consequences of Jack Philby’s treachery, for the West’s voracious appetite for oil and a ready market for arms sales, has led to the Faustian pact between the West, especially America, and Saudi Arabia.   For it is Saudi money that has funded so much of the growth of Wahhabism in the mosques and madrasas of the West.   And what is astonishing is that this is no new phenomenon.   Both the Foreign Office in London and the State Department in Washington are heaving with Arab specialists, who have known this all-too well for decades.   But somehow they have convinced themselves that courting the house of Saud would have no consequences for those home populations to whom they are answerable.  The challenge for any future British government is to let light onto what has really been happening in our country, a far greater challenge than any airstrikes in Syria.   David Cameron proclaims, “We have to hit these terrorists in their heartland right now” and yet he seems to have no idea at all where that heartland really is.   The great tragedy is that anyone who questions the Washington/London/Berlin/Riyadh orthodoxy is blackguarded and effectively precluded from the public sphere.   And the consequences of this orthodoxy are now all-too clear as the security of our people becomes increasingly fragile!

Until next Tuesday!

Toby